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Often, computer geeks who started programming at a young age brag about it, as it is a source of geeky prestige. However, most computer geeks are oblivious to the fact that your parents being able to afford a computer back in the 1980s is a product of class privilege, notyour innate geekiness. Additionally, the child’s gender affects how much the parents are willing to financially invest in the child’s computer education. If parents in the 1980s think that it is unlikely their eight-year-old daughter will have a career in technology, then purchasing a computer may seem like a frivolous expense.

Because of systemic racism, class differences correlate with racial demographics. In the Racialicious post Gaming Masculinity, Latoya quotes a researcher’s exchange with an African American male computer science (CS) undergraduate:

“Me and some of my black friends were talking about the other guys in CS. Some of them have been programming since they were eight. We can’t compete with that. Now, the only thing that I have been doing since I was eight is playing basketball. I would own them on the court. I mean it wouldn’t be fair, they would just stand there and I would dominate. It is sort of like that in CS.”– Undergraduate CS Major

Those “other guys” in CS are those white, male geeks who brag in CS newsgroups about hacking away at their Commodore 64s as young children, where successive posters reveal younger and younger ages in order to trump the previous poster. This disgusting flaunting of privilege completely demoralizes those of us who gained computer access only recently. However, CS departments—which tend to be dominated by even more privileged computer geeks of an earlier era when computers were even rarer—also assume that early computer adoption is a meritocratic measure of innate interest and ability.

When I was a young girl and learned about Lady Lovelace, the first computer programmer, I found it deliciously ironic that someone who defied gender stereotypes would have such an absurdly feminine and alliterative name.

The name “Lady Lovelace” was similar to that of a 80s cartoon character I liked when I was younger, “Lady Lovely Locks”. Lady Lovely Locks was beautiful because she had long, blonde hair, and the wicked villain was a girl with black hair. (As an Asian girl with short, black hair, Lady Lovely Locks was only one example of children’s media that communicated to me over and over again that blondes were more beautiful, and that I was ugly.) I amused myself by imagining that Lady Lovelace looked like how her name sounded, having long, flowing, blonde hair and wearing lacy dresses with heart designs, while computer programming.

What is interesting is that even at a young age, I was already aware of the stereotype that computer programming was a male domain. Some people who offer hypotheses about why fewer women go into computer science treat 18-year-old adult women like tabula rasae who have never been exposed to the idea that computer programming is for men, and attempt interventions right when women choose their university majors or accuse such late interventions of being “social engineering”.

The answer [to the cause of the gender gap in technology] may lie in Malaysia, where women make up between 50 and 60 percent of the computer industry’s employees and many hold mid- and upper-level management positions. The country’s burgeoning technology industry has brought about dramatic changes to women’s roles in society, changing traditional perceptions of class, ethnicity and gender.

[…]

The author of “Masculinity, Power and Technology: A Malaysian Ethnography,” Mellstrom has been conducting a long-term survey of female students in preparation for a new book on Malaysian women in the computer industry. In contrast to the U.S., in Malaysia jobs in technology are seen as appropriate for women: Men do not perceive indoor work as masculine and much of society stigmatizes women who work outdoors as lower class. Computing and programming are seen as “women-friendly” professions, with opportunities opening up since men are not interested in competing for these types of jobs. “It’s a woman’s world in that respect,” said Mellstrom.

Both people of colour and “computer expert” (a term that less computer-literate individuals use to refer to computer-literate individuals) friends and relatives are perceived as public resources whose raison d’être is to educate white people about race or provide personal technical support, respectively. While the two groups are not mutually exclusive, both people of colour and “computer experts” are perceived to have no lives or other interests, and are treated as if educating white people or providing technical support is “their job”.

This is why white people and less computer-literate people often complain loudly and indignantly during certain interactions, as if people of colour and “computer experts” are providing poor “customer service”. White people often complain that if people of colour do not present racial issues in a way that is appealing to whites, then white people will not want to learn about racism. (For some reason, they believe that promoting social awareness about a particular issue should be similar in process to a company promoting a product.) Less computer-literate individuals even speak condescendingly to or yell at “computer experts” with a similar sense of entitlement, as if their computer-literate relative/friend/acquaintance has the same social obligation to them as the paid technical support staff of, say, Dell.

Some women who are somewhat uncomfortable using computer technology express admiration for other women who love it. However, the women who are uncomfortable using computer technology may be unaware of the social and material obstacles due to systemic sexism that drastically reduce their chances of high computer literacy relative to men. Here are some heuristics for navigating these obstacles: